Descent of Man
The book The Reign of Law by the Duke of Argyll argued that beauty with no obvious utility, such as exotic birds' plumage, proved divine design. Darwin had to show how this was explained by his theory of sexual selection, and was now working to include this with ape ancestry and evolution of morality and religion in a new book which he now decided to call The Descent of Man.
Read more about this topic: Darwin From Descent Of Man To Emotions
Famous quotes containing the words descent and/or man:
“When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible—such descent I call beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)